| name | finish-it |
| description | Scope-cutting and shipping discipline from Derek Yu's 'Finishing a Game' and 'Death Loops', jam culture, and veteran shipping practice — diagnose why a game project stalled, cut to a shippable core, define a binary finish line, ship it. Use when: a game project is stalled or sprawling, 'I keep adding features', 'it's never done', 'should I add X before shipping?' (usually no), 'help me finish this', 'is this ready to ship?', or scoping a new game so it actually ships. |
Finish it
Finishing is a separate skill, and a finished mediocre game proves more than a
brilliant fragment. Projects die in two loops: the restart loop (skills
improved mid-project, so the dev remakes early content sideways forever — "your
code will always be a mess") and the polish loop (near-done, endlessly
refining details out of fear of judgment). Diagnose the loop before
intervening. And remember: the last 10% is really 90% — menus, death
states, audio plumbing, deploy are the game too.
Scoping a new game (so this skill is never needed)
- One core mechanic, one level/arena, one win condition, one lose
condition. Everything else is stretch.
- One-sentence pitch before code. Features not in the sentence need
explicit justification.
- Budget 50/50: half for the playable loop, half for the unfun tail. If
the loop fills the budget, the scope is wrong.
- Prototype-first split (jam culture): playable ugly loop in the first
~5% of the time; the rest is feel, art, sound, content.
- Use the engine at hand (Spelunky shipped in Game Maker), reuse and
generate assets without shame.
- Tiny finished games grow up: Celeste began as a 4-day PICO-8 jam game.
The jam-sized version is the validation step, not a compromise.
The cut list
- Keep a
NEXT_GAME.md. Every mid-build idea ("what if it had shops /
multiplayer / procgen") goes there, not in the build. Save it for the next
one — finish this one first (Yu).
- Default cut order for browser games: extra levels → extra enemy/item
types → meta-progression → settings menus → narrative → leaderboards.
- Never cut: restart flow, lose/win states, audio toggle.
- When behind: cut features. One mechanic deep beats three shallow.
- If a project must die, the successor is smaller, not bigger.
When is the core loop enough?
Stop adding mechanics when: a new player understands it without instructions
in <30s, a session has tension (can lose) and release (can win/score), and a
player voluntarily restarts once. From that moment, every proposal to add is
scope creep — route it to NEXT_GAME.md and switch to finishing mode.
The intervention (stalled project)
- Diagnose the loop. Check git history / file churn: redoing existing
things = restart loop; refining done things = polish loop; new systems
with no win state = creep. Name it plainly: "Last 5 sessions added 3
systems and the game still has no win state."
- Extract the one-sentence core — single mechanic + win + lose. If
unclear, the smallest already-fun interaction in the build IS the game.
- Triage every feature (built, half-built, planned): KEEP (serves the
core loop), CUT (delete now), DEFER (→
NEXT_GAME.md). Half-built
defaults to CUT — "just finishing it" is the restart loop's bait.
- Write the finish line as the checklist below, agreed explicitly:
boxes may be removed, never added.
- End-to-end first: title → play → lose → restart → win reachable with
placeholders before any item-level polish.
- One juice pass, one tuning pass, timeboxed. The second polish pass is
the polish death-loop.
- Ship (
vg deploy), cold-load the live URL, play one full session on
the deployed build, fix only blockers.
- Debrief: share the link, log deferred ideas, at most one v1.1 scoped
to ≤5 checklist items. Ship-then-iterate beats a delayed "complete" v1 —
deploys are cheap here.
- If the user resists ("one more feature"): offer to swap it for an
existing checklist item. Never silently extend.
Shipping checklist (binary; all boxes or no ship)
Related skills: game-playbook (the build order that avoids stalling),
deploy (the finish line), design-lenses (is the core loop enough),
ask-me (scope the next game properly before starting).
